


Love Is a Tempest

by dwanks



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: 'slaps top of this fic' this bad boy can fit so much ocean personification, Angst, Bittersweet Ending, Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/M, is 3k words a little short for an in depth character study spanning an entire mans life? yes. sorry, potc fic is a desert and i am but a simple canteen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 00:07:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29126214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dwanks/pseuds/dwanks
Summary: "On some nights, when gales roared loudest and stirred the water along those measly shores into a frenzy, Jones would wonder where the ocean kept its heart."
Relationships: Calypso | Tia Dalma/Davy Jones
Comments: 5
Kudos: 12





	Love Is a Tempest

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING FOR: Run on sentences and gratuitous abuse of thesaurus.com for that 1800's prose flavor

Davy Jones always loved the sea. He loved the breath of wind on his face, the taste of salt on his lips. When the seagulls squawked the sailor liked to listen and pretend he knew what they had to say when the wretched birds squabbled over crumbs. Jones was often called a fish on land, could never keep his legs straight on stable ground as he wobbled to and fro like a cripple with a new peg leg. Davy didn’t care. He was the best pirate that anyone knew, could tell if a storm was coming by the nature of the wind and coxed the rarest treasures from the depths as if lost gold and precious gems were mere trifles. And Davy killed. Oh, did he kill. Such as the seagull maimed the rat and the rat tore the mice. For food, survival. For the opportunity to return to sea. It was in his nature. Always the sea.

When Davy Jones met the goddess it was not man to woman but man to storm. She was no gentle wind, and the ships Calypso crashed and tore would come to haunt sailors with their ghosts as the dead yearned for the locker. What the locker was, nobody knew, but it was there, and awaited them all should they ever die in the ocean’s hands. Of course, being who he was, Jones did not fear it, not after watching the waves take its breaths off the shore in preparation for the gust it was about to blow.

He would lay awake at night when the crew would take shelter inland from hurricanes. Wondering where the ocean stored its lungs, what was body and what was blood. On some nights, when gales roared loudest and stirred the water along those measly shores into a frenzy, Jones would wonder where the ocean kept its heart. In the darkest depths, perhaps? With the skeletons of ships and crew alike in that murky place, feasting on the darkness and desolation that surrounded the heart on the seafloor? Or maybe in the light of the sun, drinking the rays and rains alongside the most beautiful coral the briney deep had to offer?

 _But does it even have one at all?_ This thought haunted Jones, kept him awake when the gusts blew as the pirate listened feverishly for a sign that his beloved was more than weather. Surely, there was more to the ocean than some moving air and water. How couldn’t he think that, when Davy saw its tides move back and fro like a breath, its denizens hunting and eating infectious invaders, and the clouds bearing a message of cold fury for trespass?

 _But could you find its heart?_ Could you find its center of being, learn its machinations to earn her favor? _If the sea was a woman,_ Davy would think, _how would you arrive at her doorstep to offer your hand?_

\--

On a day as clear as a bell, Davy Jones, the mad sailor, whose ardency lied in his fellow pirates' watery graves, dove off the high cliffs of Tortuga into the sea. His men (or rather, what was left of them, after their captain had drove the ship into the fiercest maelstrom this side of the new world) called good riddance, condemning the fanatic to the locker, who no one knew what was but fathomed that it would take the likes of Davy Jones plenty if it so chose.

It would be mean-spirited to blame those pirates for not fathoming that Jones had found a slightly more traditional love in that blue expanse. For Calypso did not love traditionally. The ocean is her body and soul, and the high seas are rarely consistent in their cruelty or kindness. For every fish caught or doubloon found a sail would tear and a crewmate would be injured. Perhaps even die if the currents so chose. But Jones didn’t care. He had been with the sea his entire life, if he couldn’t deal with the hardships, what gave any man a right to call themselves a sailor? So as the years drove on, Calypso granted Davy Jones with a purpose.

 _Mine,_ she would tell him with gleaming bubbled eyes, _is to guard what must be guarded, and_ \- she would interject with a sly sharks smile, _to teach the residents of land their place._ Calypso placed a strong, damp hand on the pirate’s shoulders. _Yours will be to guide the souls who did not learn their lesson._ Then she would laugh, he would concur, and only then would they kiss, past the coat of salt on their respective skins, and at that moment and a few moments after that, Davy felt as if he could conquer the world.

In this degree the world spun on for a while, pirates and commodores praying for Calypso’s mercies on the seas. And at that odd intersection of currents where up is down, a certain pirate captain’s old mates saw that madcap of a sailor one last time before passing onward past the horizon. The waves drew breath upon the shore, and Davy Jones was content for a time. 

\--

Calypso had left.

Davy didn’t want to believe it at first. When he stepped onto dry land for the first time in ten years, legs more unsteady than a babes first step and skin peppered with the beginnings of barnacles, he thought for sure he read the signs wrong. Currents that usually parted beneath his bow gave the Flying Dutchman no mind, clouds above performed no welcoming dance. By Calypso, the _waves_ even, the waves were beating in an undead rhythm with no life or direction behind them at all, as if they were monotonously slapping away on the sand by sheer habit and muscle memory alone.

He searched that island for his entire day. Every nook, cranny, cave, even tidepool. During all that time when the sun rose then lowered Davy still looked. The crew were the ones to pull him back, growing concerned because neither tide nor wind graced the Flying Dutchman. _We think we’re in a doldrum,_ they cautioned, _we must row the Dutchman away from shore if we’re to get to our charges in time._ But their captain didn’t hear them. A doldrum? A _doldrum_? What sort of preposterous lunery was that? Was he not the harbor of the ocean’s lost souls as well as the lover of it too? Who was she, who was _anything_ to inhibit Davy Jones to a place where the ocean did not breath?

The captain holed himself in his quarters, beard a soppy wild mess as the man pressed a barnacled ear against the planks, trying to listen, trying to hear past the stomps of the crew and creaks of sturdy half-wood. Listening, fervently, for a beat of dear Calypso’s hidden heart in the abyss below. Because Jones had searched everywhere else in those long ten years, and some before that, and not once was the heart found, it couldn’t possibly be anywhere else. Because - and here his own stilled with a cold clench in the man’s waterlogged chest - Calypso had not given her heart to Jones. Calypso made no binding promise as he to their love, hadn’t she? Gifts and trinkets and an eternal voyage are all one thing but what had the goddess had to _sacrifice_?

Water crashed around the Flying Dutchman as untrained hands on deck tried and failed to tame the cursed ship. Finally Davy heard a pounding on the entrance to his cabin and opened the door to find his first mate, frantically pointing to a cyclone on the horizon. Jones strided past paying no heed, staring at the brewing weather like it had insulted him personally. Storming past more of his crew, the captain of the Flying Dutchman took the grime-coated wheel and jerked it directly in the way of the hurricane.

Davy sacrificed for her! Jones had given up his _life_ for her. Every waking moment since he was a boy to the dreaded sodden afterlife where his love had the pirate ferry her victims out of sight. Davy scoffed. Out of sight out of mind indeed. Was he only given what he was because it was _convenient_ for the goddess? Because the all-wise and all-mighty Calypso could not be bothered to guide her own victims to their final resting place? Who did the ocean think it was, to seduce a man into its depths to serve its every whim and will?

Jones bellowed out orders to his crew as they sailed straight and true into the tempest. Waves swelled and crashed as the rain pounded into the sails, biting cheeks with an ice cold sting before flowing down their backs. Every question that tried to ask itself was drowned by the downpour or overshadowed with an explosion of thunder. Lightning threw the silhouettes of other, less fortunate ships into sharp relief while the undead sailed past, pirates and privateers alike overpowered by the ferocious turbulence of the sea. And all the while, Davy Jones was still listening, still trying to find a hint that his love was in that upsurge, that Calypso had merely jested and that she was here to pay him mind.

But this storm, while intense and moreover unrestrained, held no supernatural power behind it’s roars, operated not on the mood of the ocean goddess, and so Davy screamed. He screamed over the sound of wind that held no special care for him or his crew, screamed over the beating of waves whose undulating breaths carried no words from his lover. Past the bitter taste of salt on his tongue while the brine coated his beard and skin and washed them away, until Davy Jones and his seastruck sailors weren’t who they once were anymore, when exiting that fateful storm.

\--

The Dutchman continued on its intended course for a while, after the hurricane. Guide souls to the locker, make sure none were dragged out. No clouds bearing a message of forgiveness or question made themselves present against the unwavering rise and set of the sun whose twilight stretched unnaturally in the watery expanse. Stuck in that endless horizon between not enough living but not quite dead, Davy thought of cruelty.

Not just on what Calypso did to him, although that occupied more than a number of thoughts. Every island the ship passed reminded Jones of the barrenness of that abode, the memory of his affections forever tainted in the cold name of betrayal. Was he just not good enough for her, or did the goddess not account for flighty passions in her long life? Perhaps she was always like this and Davy had just been too blind of her sublimity to notice the deaths, the destruction she caused to innocent men trying to sail to the New World. What did the people on shore ever do to Calypso, to justify winds that tore their roofs and livelihoods? Were hurricanes truly in equal to anything men could do to her or her turf? And where, where did she keep her _heart_?

Every mistake by the mutated deck hands on the Flying Dutchman were reprimanded tenfold for daring to distract the captain from his wallows. Inward his thoughts went, spiraling ever more wildly until reflections on the edge were indistinguishable from terrible musings in the center of Davy’s mental hurricane.

Calypso had dominated his heart for so long, just as the god had dominated her realm, allowing no one to dare tread unless by her pure favor. Playing with the hearts of men whose only crimes were committed with the same motivations as Calypso’s petty wrath. Greed and territory and _control_. She was no better than the humans the heathen god looked down upon! Many men, not just Davy Jones, gave up life on land for the sea, but their landlord apparently viewed her tenets as meer trifles to gift or slight. Rain for drought, gold for sand, _love_ for _abandonment_.

Jones fumed, his now altered form writhing against his likewise ancient coat, frayed with barnacles and seaweed and mud. The deckings of a bottom feeder, but Davy still had knowledge, he still had power. No longer would Calypso play with the hearts of sailors! She had ruled the seas to her desires for a far ample time already. If the only language she spoke was dominion, then Jones would simply talk back in the words of dominance.

The captain barked orders to the Flying Dutchman, ignoring the serenading moans of drowned spirits as their guide embarked onto a new duty. Davy Jone’s mind had been set, and he ignored the painful clenches of his heart as the cursed ship dove, dove, dove back into the world of living men.

\--

Davy was out at sea, as he was cursed eternally to do, when he felt the oceans shift, and the true gravity of what the pirate captain had done was enough to bring the tormentor down to his knees.

The tides, the tides felt _dead_ , like the doldrum but abysmally worse, it engulfed everything he had and left barely null to process. If that terrible place was the sort of unlife granted by Calypso then these currents were _skeletons_ , the sort of true undead that ripped and tore at passing by ships to convince themselves that they still remembered how to live. Davy rushed to the railing and reached out with his remaining fingertips only to shoot back a moment later. The sea spray had the same lightness and texture as ash. He faintly heard the crew murmuring to themselves as Jones looked frantically at the horizon to see clouds fading at an alarming rate, dissipating into more of that putrid un-mist and coating the surface of the water in a ghastly leaden film.

It struck the former man, far too sluggishly, that this was the doing of the Brethren Court, and Calypso was sealed into a mortal form… and sealed off from the _sea_. A vivid cold sensation shuddered through Jone’s frame and pooled into a certain width in his chest, and continued to sit as Davy’s thoughts raced themselves into a cyclone once more.

His heart, his heart! Oh, how that traitorous organ misled him down such a tragic path! It had brought nothing but infatuation and jealousy, and now Davy Jones had doomed his one and only love much of the same imprisoned life as he. She was the sea, she was the all of the oceans’ fury and favor wrapped into one superfluous avatar and Jones tore that away, through trickery of pirates and bewitchment from their miraculously elected king!

And Davy Jones thought that this is why Calypso wasn’t there all those moons ago, because she saw what lied in the depths of her suitor’s soul, and the pain from that dreaded realization was nearly enough to rival the act of cutting his own heart from its’ brine-filled sternum as he cried a former goddess’s name. 

\--

A seagull cawed, the waters took a shaky breath, and life went on. 

  
Sailors forgot the day the ocean was coated in remnants of heathenistic divine power, and continued to fish and explore and plunder, unaware that they lived in a time where the ocean did not bite back so viciously. The tides weren't as full as they once were, and could not push back against the bows of ships, and neither could they maintain the pressure on the souls it once drowned with delight. Bays grew polluted with the presence of uncontained spirits and bloated with the barely contained malice of the dead. Men began to fear not the ocean itself but the souls within it, terrified that they too would corrupt into something less than what they were.

  
The patron of those lost phantoms, whose duty Jones neglected with great voracity, ruled his high seas (and they were his, for the pirate lords imprisoned a goddess to command the oceans as their own, and Jones was the unspoken king over those scoundrels) with an half-iron claw, sometimes scouring the currents unrelentingly only to withdraw for decades, the faint thrum of an organ the singular indication that the altered forms of the Flying Dutchman's crew still lied in the depths. 

  
Once in a blue moon, the blighted vessel would surface in a particularly malevolent downpour, so that Davy would stand on deck, letting the rain hit his face and let the monsoonic power overtake his soul. Inevitably, however, Davy would listen too closely, be reminded of how the seas once where, and so the baneful lilting of a certain churchly instrument would echo across the flowing spires in the epicenter of the newest atlantic downpour, in an effort to drown out the half-breathing floods. Haunted reedy notes rang in the ears of already panicked sailors, hands relaxing from ropes and instead grasped together in crosses or more generic prayers. And when those souls met Jones, he asked if they feared the fate of mortal men and offered a certain other kind of cruelty instead. If he can dominate the seas, then why can’t he give men the illusion of domination over their deaths? And if they refused, well, it was of little consequence to him. 

In the weakest moments Davy would think about what he could’ve done differently, but predominantly he attempted to ignore the state of Calypso’s realm, the half-hearted grasps to drag the boat downward, the ever-slight decrease in pressure in deeper waters. The whole expanse struggled to maintain itself, losing grip on large stretches of ocean that both pirates and navy men now sailed without fear. For the first time in his life, Davy Jones looked at the sea as many a sailor did, and saw nothing more than water you can’t drink and a drifting tide on a beach. 

If his heart wasn’t already torn and buried on that infernal island, Davy was afraid that it would break twice. 

\--

The dead man’s chest was open, it’s treasure ceased writhing on the steeped planks of a certain eternally sailing vessel, and the world never felt more cruel.

The sterns of the Flying Dutchman and Black Pearl were rammed together in a death’s embrace, roaring waters crashing into their bows and booming thunder covering any pleas for mercy, because Calypso! By the gods deemed heathen, Calypso was free! Davy wanted to pray, to adage, to sing to the heavens and the dark trench abyss until his cephalopod voice was hoarse, and continue cheering onward nonetheless, _because Calypso was free_. 

Years of imprisonment tailored her wrath into a reckoning, and the ensuing maelstrom churned with such an engulfing violence that all vessels gathered by the Brethren and British were being pulled into the vortex, a hole in the Caribbean where the goddess will drown her perpetrators and send their wretched souls to his infernal locker for the damned. The intermingled bloodbath of privateers and marauders cursed greased the already brine slicked wood of doomed ships while sea dwellers and men alike slaughtered each other. Heaven hath no fury, for the realm below was using all God had.

But his heart had ceased to beat, and Jones was forced to confront that he had little time to savor the singular moment he and his love had. And perhaps he had deserved it for all his cruelty, no matter what his treasure had to say about his supposed lack of it. She had no room to judge, being the soul to the world’s cruelest landscape she was. The currents ripped the ships to shreds, and belatedly Davy only realized just then that Calypso might’ve been the ocean’s heart he was looking for, all those many years ago. 

So as he let gravity take him to his own locker, he observed how the roar of thunder paralleled cries of anguish, and how the rain seemed so much like tears, as Davy Jones fell into the eye of the lovers’ tempest. 

**Author's Note:**

> tysm for reading!! hope you enjoyed this or at least found my interpretation of Davy Jones's and Calypso relationship interesting. You have a wonderful day : )


End file.
